Fixing California: The income gap: Leaders prefer rhetoric to action

Sunday marked the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Bros. — the event that accelerated America’s descent into a deep recession that still lingers in much of California. The anniversary came two days after the state Legislature wrapped up its 2013 session.

Both occasions were marked with rhetoric about jobs and our economy that ignored both basic facts and large, long-term trends.

In Washington, President Barack Obama gave interviews about the Lehman anniversary in which he acknowledged that income inequality — the gap between the richest and the poorest Americans — has worsened since his election in 2008.

Obama blamed congressional Republicans’ failure to approve his budget plans — specifically, his calls for ever-more “stimulus” spending using borrowed money. This is baffling. Just as we can’t borrow our way to prosperity, we can’t borrow our way to a more egalitarian society.

When you set aside the class-warfare rhetoric that Democrats so enjoy, the drivers of income inequality are plain. The first is rarely acknowledged. It’s the increasing tendency of highly educated professionals to marry each other. Doctors used to marry nurses. Now they marry other doctors, concentrating family wealth.

The second is that the modern economy places an ever-higher premium on job skills, and yet we don’t have a public education system that responds to this fact. In 2013, how is it possible that a year or more of computer science isn’t a universal high school graduation requirement?

It’s not just information-technology jobs going unfilled because of a mismatch between what schools teach and what employers need. In many skilled-job categories — welders, critical-care nurses, electrical linemen, special-education teachers, geotechnical engineers, respiratory therapists — unemployment is practically zero.

So long as we have an absurdly complex tax code in which the amount that the very wealthy pay depends on the skill of their tax attorneys, the Occupy argument that the U.S. is rigged to help the rich will resonate with some. But this doesn’t address the disconnect between what our schools teach and what our economy needs.

Which brings us to Sacramento. When the 2013 legislative session began, Gov. Jerry Brown, Senate President Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John Pérez all vowed to push regulatory relief and other measures to create jobs. All three professed, like Obama, to worry about income inequality.

Flash-forward nine months, and what did we get? Little regulatory relief, a big hike in the minimum wage and little evidence of any long-term thinking about how to bolster California’s middle class. Nothing was done to address the disconnect between the skills of the Golden State’s high-school graduates and the needs of employers.

But instead of chagrin over their record, state leaders rushed to congratulate each other. Brown, Steinberg and Pérez are fine with a state status quo in which nearly one in five adults who want to work full-time can’t find a job.

If you wonder why California has the nation’s highest poverty rate (after cost of living is factored in), our leaders’ apathy about public despair is a good place to start.